Writing Nature into the Gideon Stoltz Mysteries

Nowadays I live in northern Vermont, but I was born and raised in the Ridge and Valley region of central Pennsylvania, where the main character in my historical mystery series, Sheriff Gideon Stoltz, tries to solve murders in the 1830s. Readers tell me that my descriptions of plants and animals and landscape and weather bring a vivid sense of place to my fiction.

When I was young, I often walked from our house into the fields and woods bordering our town. I remember almost jumping out of my skin when a chunky brown bird came thundering out of the brush a few feet away: The first ruffed grouse I’d ever seen.

Another time, I peered up at a sizeable hole in a dead tree – and suddenly this huge prehistoric-looking black-and-white bird came swooping in and clamped itself onto the tree’s trunk like it had magnetized feet: A pileated woodpecker, with a rattling call and a flaming red crest on its head. A week later, through binoculars, I watched the woodpecker and its mate feed insects to the hungry youngsters that poked their heads out of that tree hole.

The part of central Pennsylvania I come from has farming valleys with good limestone soil, separated one from another by long parallel sandstone ridges, which are largely forested. Back in the 1830s, fewer farms had been carved out of the woods.

cooper’s hawk by tom berriman

There were fast-growing towns, like my fictional Adamant in my imagined Colerain County, and a burgeoning charcoal-fired iron industry drawing on the region’s abundant resources of timber, iron ore, limestone, and water power. I’ve done a lot of research into the early nineteenth century, and I’ve visited natural areas where the original forest still remains, places that probably don’t look much different today than they did during Gideon’s era.

As the author of seventeen nonfiction books on nature and the outdoors, I’ve studied and written about trees, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, plants, mushrooms. Some of my books present detailed natural history accounts of trees and wildlife. Others are collections of essays about country living and various experiences I’ve had in nature: stories about foxes, woodchucks, bears, bats, crows, owls, whip-poor-wills, spring peepers, fireflies, foraging for wild foods, splitting firewood, reading maps, and more.

Putting details about nature into my fiction makes the writing fun – and I believe it adds to the reader’s enjoyment. Here are a few of the natural things I’ve put in my mysteries.

Gideon spied a strange object in a tree . . . His first impression was that it was a heart, a human heart, plucked out of someone’s breast, pierced and hung up on a branch six feet above the ground. But no, it was only a hornets’ nest, constructed around a branch in a small maple. A dead nest: the frosts had killed the hornets, and it hung there gray and heart-shaped and unraveling, paper tatters waffling in the wind.

The air felt cool and damp. A loud rushing came from overhead as a flock of pigeons took off from the trees; it sounded to Gideon as if a huge canvas tarpaulin had been suddenly and noisily torn from the roof of the forest.

An owl hooted from the shadows. A raven sounded a series of metallic tocks that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.

Gideon startled at a loud snort followed by hooves thumping. A moment of silence, then more thumps as the unseen deer came down from its high bound and its hooves struck the earth again; then another moment of silence as it leapt farther down into the Big Kettle.

In Nighthawk’s Wing, Gideon and his wife True listen to a tale told by True’s gram while the three of them sit around a fire at night, surrounded by the ear-pulsing racket made by thousands of katydids calling from the surrounding forest: Katy-did, she didn’t, she did.

“They say the katydids tell a story,” Gram Burns said. “Two sisters fell in love with the same man, and Katy was the one who didn’t win his heart. Later, the man and the other sister died – they were poisoned. The insects in the trees kept saying ‘Katy-did!’ because Katy was the one who murdered them.”

Sights. Sounds. Smells. Details that put the reader in Gideon Stoltz’s world. To me, that’s what fiction should do: create a scene for a reader so that they almost live it.